Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    How We Are Hungry
    How We Are Hungry
    How We Are Hungry
    Audiobook6 hours

    How We Are Hungry

    Written by Dave Eggers

    Narrated by Dion Graham

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, New York Times best-selling author Dave Eggers is the voice of a generation. This stunning collection of his matchless short fiction includes the highly acclaimed "The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water." "Eggers imagines emotionally and symbolically resonant scenes as well as any of his contemporaries, and this collection has several great ones."-Booklist
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9781461813606
    How We Are Hungry
    Author

    Dave Eggers

    Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, a quarterly journal and website (www.mcsweeneys.net), and his books include You Shall Know Our Velocity, How We Are Hungry, Short Short Stories, What is the What, and the bestselling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and Ocean Navigator. He is the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Northern California.

    More audiobooks from Dave Eggers

    Related to How We Are Hungry

    Related audiobooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for How We Are Hungry

    4/5

    20 ratings20 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I don't know how I feel about Dave Eggers, I really don't.
    • 4/5
      Excellent collection of stories by one of my favorite authors. Typical Eggers material, sounds very autobiographical even when it's about a woman traveling to Mt. Kilimanjaro or a dog running races. If you've enjoyed any other books by this talented author, I would definitely recommend this work.
    • 5/5
      I love this book! Plain and simple.
    • 5/5
      In this book, the stories get better and better as the book continues. My favorite was "After I was Thrown in the River and Before I drowned", a story about a dog who races through the wood s with other dogs until he does not make a crucial jump. I loved the description of the dog as sleeping curled up inside his own skin in the interim between life and death. I also liked " Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" and "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly." "Your Mother and I" was the funniest,it is a father teling his child about all the amazing things that he accomplished with the mother, some of these things are quite humurous such as painting Kansas purple. What is also great about this story is the long paragraphs and the tangents that the speaker goes off on. It's like a conversation with a very funny and intersting person with a crazy imagination.
    • 5/5
      A lot of the reviews I'd read of this book have mentioned that they thought Eggers was trying to hard to be literary and that most of the stories were just too self-conscious. And most of them, in their trite way, claimed that the book left them hungry. However, I have to enthusiastically disagree.I loved this book. Not all the stories are as engaging, and I'm not sure about the extremely short one or two page stories, but I Iove the spiritual-esque feeling that Eggers captures in most of the stories.Also, the final story in the book, "After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned," is just amazing. I'd actually read in before in Speaking to Angels, a compilation edited by Nick Hornby, but after reading it a second time, I was completely floored. That story alone makes this book completely worth buying this book.I can't wait for Egger next work, and I hope he continues on his self-conscious, too literary trend, because I like the direction his work is going, even if the critics don't.
    • 5/5
      This is a great collection of stories from one of my favorite writers. Worth buying it for the last story ("After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned") alone.
    • 3/5
      I liked most of the stories in here. The story from the perspective of Steven the dog was the best, though. hehe!
    • 3/5
      I have not read many short story compilations and this was my first Dave Eggers piece to read.Some of the stories, typically the longer ones, were engaging with interesting characters. The stories that I particularly enjoyed were: “Another” and “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly.” However, most of the stories seemed to lack a crux. I was not particularly moved or attached to any of the characters or stories. Overall it was a good read, but nothing that I would consider especially remarkable.
    • 2/5
      Lacking substance. Of fifteen stories, one story consists of six empty pages. (There is only a title.) Half of the other stories are only, barely two pages long. Many stories are about nothing, or much of the content is baloney. The stories at the beginning of the book seem better, and the overall quality declines toward the end. It is not clear what the title of the collection refers to. Maybe the sense of undernourishment, we are left with upon finishing the book; mentally, that is.
    • 4/5
      Listened to the audio book - three stars for the stories, plus a bonus star for the narrator.
    • 5/5
      even if you are not an eggers fan this is an excellent read.
    • 4/5
      I admit, many of the stories in this book were a bit strage... (per usual for Eggers). His stories often times don't stay with you, but the characters do. By far, my favorite story in this collection was "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" (also the longest story in the collection). Maybe it's because I am an outdoor girl at heart and I love mountain climbing stuff, but this was just an incredable story! Now I can't wait to read What is the What.
    • 5/5
      I wish more of my favorite authors would release collections of their short fiction. I really enjoyed this collection. It's not perfect--there are a couple of stories here that didn't hold my interest--but there are others that are just wonderful. It's not a perfect book, but I'm feeling generous with my star rating. It's not all that inflated.

      Eggers isn't for everyone--but he's for me, and that's all I need.
    • 3/5
      I have trouble putting my finger on what I find wrong with this collection. I generally enjoy Eggers. (Note, I consider You Shall Know Our Velocity a really great book.) But then I have trouble enjoying any of the McSweeney collections. So, what is wrong with this collection? In general, I could get no involvement in the longer pieces. A lot seems to happen in them, but they are just pieces of nothing. Of interest, the short pieces (and I mean short – one- two-page write ups) are the stars of the collection. Quick shots that generally left me stunned. So why couldn’t the long pieces do that? I can’t answer that. All I can say is that, even when they were at their “best”, they still weren’t good enough to make me think there might be something there.
    • 1/5
      I hated this book - the writing may be excellent but the stories are ugly and largely irredeemably bleak ... and it gave me no pleasure.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories from Dave Eggers, one of my favorite authors, one of which ("The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water") continues on with the characters from his novel, "You Shall Know Our Velocity". Eggers is creative and always entertaining. Collections of short stories are always a little hard to review because one's response will vary across the stories, and this is no exception; I think it's particularly true in this case because Eggers pushes the envelope in content and style. I really enjoyed "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance", "Quiet", and "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly". "Up the Mountain" is about a group of American tourists with various backgrounds and skeletons in the closet hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro and is the most touted; I suppose this is because it's the most "complete" of the stories. "Quiet" tells of the difficulty of friendship turning romantic for two friends who meet in Scotland. "Climbing to the Window" is about coping with a cousin's suicide attempt. Eggers has both a lightness and a deepness about him and is not afraid to try new forms. He is not always for everybody because the lightness can come across sometimes as silly, the deepness trite, and the new forms strange. An example of the latter is the two page story "What It Means When a Crowd In a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing your own Nation, Shoots HIm, Drags Him from his Vehicle and then Mutilates him in the Dust"; whew the title is almost longer than the story. However, when he's on, he's on, and there's no denying Eggers has talent and is worth reading.Quotes:On God, from "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water":"But then why God at all? The oil-wet water was not God. It was not the least bit spiritual. It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when Pilar put her hand into it, and it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn't that enough?"On helplessness in relationships, from "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance":"Years ago he thought he could have an effect on Adam's life, but now he knows he's a spectator, a parent watching a child's sporting event, hands twisted into fists, unable to influence the outcome."On sorrow, from "Climbing...""...this is nothing, this drive - this is sorrow. It makes you want to freeze the world and shatter it with an ax."On desire, from "Quiet":"I was overcome: I coveted her and the world in that order. I kept a close eye on the side of her head, to see if she would turn her face toward mine. If that were to happen I would kiss her for a short time and then stop, and then laugh it off, pretend that we were just being dopes. I would kiss her long enough to satisfy my curiosity about kissing her but briefly enough that I could dismiss the kiss - ha ha what a riot, coiuldn't matter less.But it would always matter! I would always think of this time, of these hugs, of a kiss, should it come. I would catalog it and reference it frequently..."On the pain of knowing, from "Quiet":"Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads? I was inviting a permanent, violent guest into my home. He would defecate on my bed. He would shred my clothes, light fires on the walls. I could see him walking up the driveway and I stood at the door, knowing that I'd be a fool to bring him inside. But still I opened the door."And this from "Quiet", a touch of sorrow and a great ending:"Why does it give so much comfort to be responsible for someone's sleep? We all - don't we? - want creatures sleeping in our homes while we walk about, turning off lights. I wanted this now. I touched Erin's soft head and she allowed me. She allowed me because she was tired. She seemed so profoundly tired. After Scotland I would not hear from her again.As my fingers spidered through the strands of Erin's hair, the brightness outside took my eyes from the room. The moon was striped by the blinds but I could see its nickly shimmer on the bay. It looked like aluminum foil, when crumpled and then smoothed with a thumb or the back of a knife. It smiled, eyed me with an unwelcome knowingness, and began to speak."On parenthood, from "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly":"No one ever said so but they didn't think it appropriate that the kids slept in her bed. Gwen had found it odd when Rita had bought a larger bed, but Rita knew that having those two bodies near her, never touching anywhere but a calf or ankle, her body calming their fears, was the only indispensible experience of her life or anyone else's."On meaninglessness, from "After I Was Thrown in the River":"You tell me it matters, what they all say. I have listened and long ago I stopped. Just tell me it matters and I will listen to you and I will want to be convinced. You tell me that what is said is making a difference, that those words are worthwhile words and mean something. I see what happens. I live with people who are German. The collect steins. They are good people. Their son is dead. I see what happens."
    • 5/5
      This was excellent. After the first story, I felt the initial tentacles of dislike curling about, but after the "The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water," I had a lot of hope. My favorite was very easily "Quiet." It was, for me, very poignant. I can't really explain it. It have no personal connections to any of the characters, yet, that poignancy is there nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      If you think it's a little strange that I am recommending a book of short stories so highly, then consider who wrote these stories. For those familiar with Dave Eggers' previous work, it should come as no surprise that this book is at times outstanding, at other times mundane, a little quirky, a little anxious and above all, seemingly real. My favorite story is also the longest (and not many of them are longer than a few pages). If you expect something like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, then you will be disappointed. This book is much more like the (completely) fictional You Shall Know Our Velocity, and even has character tie-ins to that book. Like most books of short stories, there are weak points. The story with the longest title might be the shortest in the book, and has almost nothing to do with the title. But there are a few stories here that make this a collection worth owning.
    • 5/5
      Be sure to read "Going Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly."
    • 3/5
      The first story in this collection, about a grieving man on the move in the Middle East, was perfect. The writing was so tight, the action so constant, the meaning so heavy, I was hooked. And the rest of the book never lived up to the great expectations that were immediately set. The rest of the stories were too saturated in middle-class angst, with unlikeable characters doing unlikeable things.